I'm pretty sure I'm a workaholic because it's the only thing I've found yet that I can be addicted to that doesn't slow down my productivity.

103108

I had a Happy Halloween.

Past Due

These are some of my portrait panels from the Merge Again show in July.



James Carey


Jonathan Dodge


Andy Breig


Opie


Self-Portrait


Taylor Martin


Tommy Kha

To Any Potential Friends:

-If you are the type of person who cannot stay home alone and be okay with that, we probably won't along.
-If you are the type of person who needs company to run errands, we probably won't along.
-If you are the type of person who needs others to constantly validate and supplement your self-esteem, we probably won't along.
-If you are the type of person who puts the responsibility of keeping you entertained or happy on others, we probably won't along.
-If you are the type of person whose daily routine is comprised primarily around a substance, we probably won't get along.
-If you are the type of person who dwells on petty drama between your friends, boyfriend, ex-boyfriends, friends' boyfriends, friends of ex-boyfriends, and/or ex-boyfriends of friends, we probably won't along.

However,
-if you are the type of person who can call, ask to hang out, receive a no, and be okay with that, then we may just get along.
-if you are the type of person who likes talking about illustration, or movie directors, or websites with particularly good design, or zombie lore, or graphic novels, or any other interesting topic displaced from the mundane gossip of small college living, we may just get along.
-if you are the type of person who is too busy with all of the extra projects you keep taking on to even have friends, we probably will get along.

THIS BUILDING



IS SO OURS NOW.
...is gone.

THANK YOU KRISTI DUCKWORTH.

To all of the new MCA freshman:

If you are sleeping a healthy eight hours a night, eating three square meals, showering daily or even just regularly, not consuming caffeine, and living in a clean, orderly room, then

you're probably failing.

On that note...

If everything one does or goes through is a means of growing or progressing in some way, I believe the utilitarian function of romantic relationships are to end tragically. It seems people never really learn anything profound from the other person until then.

ONE DAY
we will all look back on these days of living paycheck to paycheck, wearing the cleanest of the dirty shirts to work, eating crackers for dinner, sleeping in our classrooms, buying mapco burgers at 5AM, drinking construction site vodka on porches, applying bug spray to work in our studios, blogging our complaints on the internet, conning overdraft charges to afford rent, shoplifting acrylics paints, and literally living off of coffee, ramen, and pall mall lights,

AND LAUGH.

Do vs. Think

The other night, I had a conversation with a close friend about the difference between thought-oriented people and action-oriented people. Often enough, people don't have a balance between the thought and the action. Thought people are very thorough in their thought processes. Every action they take, every paint stroke they lay down, every sentence out of their mouths is highly weighed, considered, and analyzed. Often times, it's out some kind of insecurity (isn't every interesting personality aspect always come back to insecurity?) of looking stupid. As with anything, even too much of a good thing can be bad. I know thought-oriented people, and they drive me crazy. I feel like they never take a break. They could never sit and watch a mindless movie contentedly, or draw a picture that didn't mean something so much deeper.

Then there's the action-oriented. As with thought people, action people have a split between thought and action, but the focus is on the actions. The actions represent the thought, and unlike thought people who analyze life for each and every decision, several, or even a hundred actions can equally represent one idea.

Myself? Action-oriented. I don't do a lot of thinking, weighing, doubting, or analyzing on a regular basis. I take an idea I like, I figure it out, and I act on it. The difference is just what it is that keeps you sane. Rethinking the ideas and concepts that make up your life constantly? Or acting on them constantly, using the trial and error method, figuring out a mode of living is good or bad by thinking only so far ahead, and acting out the rest.

I've been doing things. I'm always doing something. Most of my actions and efforts are toward one idea. One idea I thought up a long time ago and started doing things toward it, and I just never stopped. That idea is Rozelle Artists Guild. Sometimes I have to stand back and rethink the manner in which I'm going about these actions, to make sure they are still matching up with that idea. Sometimes the idea gets stale, and I have to marinate a while to juice it back up. But I'm an action-oriented person because the DO is what keeps me sane. It's what keeps me going. If I have more than a day with no commitments, appointments, calls, e-mails, flyers, or busied time, I GO INSANE!

However, being an action-oriented person so much of the time, sometimes I just need a long stretch of time to reevaluate the situations in my life, just to make sure I'm still chasing the same idea, and to make sure that idea is the one I still want to chase. It takes me longer than other people to logic out and prioritize big things like Rozelle, or being with Shea, or going to school. I often find that when I suspend myself in a go-nowhere thought process, squeezing my brain in a clamp to make sense of all the actions I've been doing... I end up insane. The way back to sanity is to just.. act. See what happens, or what doesn't.

I HAVE FINALLY ACQUIRED INDESIGN.
...which means that I can finally open & edit my trading cards. And I just spent a good two hours converting these to web-friendly jpegs (not to mention the 30 minutes spent searching for a free Bauhaus font download. I don't remember it being so difficult the first few times I downloaded it at school...)
ANYWAY. Here's a sneak preview:

and the rest of them can be viewed here:
laurenrae.carbonmade.com
(Which is my spiffy new gallery birthday present. Thanks Dad!)

That is all.

I'm in a show

The Andy Warhol exhibit just opened at the Brooks, From A to B and Back Again. I'm not really much of a fan of Warhol... Seems like he was just weird to be weird. And the art, well, it's tough to describe my qualm, being an artist that specializes in a design art oftentimes made to be duplicated, but, I guess the idea that you are never looking at a Warhol original bugs me too much to enjoy it. I like to look at art and think about how long it took to make, and I have no guage for his art. I mean, how long does it take to copy a photo? Is copying an image repeatedly art? If it makes a point once, can it make a new point by being repeated, or slightly altered, or the colors experimented with? Maybe it can.


myself, photoshop

It's been a while since I posted anything I've been up to artistically. Here are two metal pieces I've been working on in the past couple semesters.

I made these in Intermediate Metals 2 but they "let go" of Richard Prillaman, master silversmith, a week before classes began, so Bill Price, the replacement, barely had time to get moved let alone line out a lesson plan. So our first project (to research the history of tea and create a tea infuser based on that research) ended up being our only required project for the semester. I completed most of one other project, a sundial that my grandfather has been hounding me over since he saw the first one I made in Introduction to Metalsmithing my second semester. Twasn't Bill's fault our semester was so misguided. We ended up missing nearly a third of our classes due to holidays, advisory days, and a few sick days on his behalf. Regardless, Price has done more in renovating that metals studio in his short career at MCA than I have seen any department leader do. New cabinets, torches, and countertops.

Anyway. This is my tea infuser. The cap of the acorn is copper, the base is nickel, the branch is silver, and it's held together by small magnets.








Here is my sundial. It's 22g copper sheet, formed to hell, with lost wax cast bronze head, tail and feet, and an unintentional mix of silver and lead solder.



I made the sundial as a going-away present for my grandparents, who are moving to Florida tomorrow for their retirement. They both loved it, and I was pretty fucking proud I finally finished it.

Self Portrait in Tree of Life

Salvaged wooden chandelier, sculpey, silver wire, plaster, epoxy, acrylic. April 2008


Thar she blows.
5:30AM Friday morning, the day it was due.

This was my response piece to the week I spent in Mexico City during Spring Break. I made the sculpture for the post-international travel exhibition, participation a requirement to gain studio credit for the trip. It's a self portrait in a modernized version of the traditional trees of life made in certain areas of Mexico (the tradition really only perpetuates through four remaining families). They were originally used as elaborate candelabras given to newlywed couples on the wedding day, but have since claimed their own stake in the folk art world, and transformed eventually into Dies de las Muertas shrines, commemorating lost loved ones.

Mine holds a self portrait in the center, done in the folk art style, complete with signature side pony tail and nose ring (a bit of bent wire through the nostril orifices). I hold a bouquet of flowers to honor the dead. The tree itself is an evolution of an abstract flowing curved forms that I've been working with for the past several years, painted stark white and decorated with tear drops that flow down to the trunk, where they pool under me. These represent actual tears, and they are watering the tree (and me) to illustrate the point in my life I was at when I made the trip to Mexico. It was a difficult, introspective period in which recognizing problems, crying my eyeballs out, and moving on & growing were paramount. There are seven dangling tear drops as well, for things I have not totally gotten over, and perhaps will not, for the best. These are the fruits of the tree. The two sets of wrestling masks are a take on the universal theatrical symbol of happy/sad masks, representing the balance of melancholy and joy in my life, set on either side of me.

The four skeletons represent four of the deaths that have affected me the most: My great-grandmother, who I witnessed deteriorate in mind for years from Alzheimers, a disease that runs rampant in my family among women, and thus a very real reality for my future; My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Williamson, who personally addressed administration to have me considered for honors programs and enriched art classes as young kid paving the way to achieve a lot more academically in high school, who had a diabetic seizure while driving and hit a tree, severing his spine; Laura Marie Ragonese-Snik, the aunt that I never got to meet, who was on the 101st floor of the second WTC building hit on September 11th, 2001, and whose death ravaged my family for years; My first theatre teacher, Mr. Collins, who died only last month from a stroke.

Unfortunately, when this sculpture went on display, the shelf on which it was placed was not properly secured to wall, and when my father made a special trip to midtown to see it, and rested a finger on the shelf, it fell and smashed into 20 or so pieces. Miraculously, the heavy plaster base made it in tact, and almost all of the armature as well. An hour of epoxy had it looking like nothing had ever happened, as most of the breaks had occurred at the joints. Unfortunately again, before I could reattach the self-portrait sculpture to the base, Shea jostled the shelf in the studio on which it was resting, and it was smashed irreparably. So, I am in the process of completely resculpting, baking, gluing, and painting it currently. The professor who wrongly hung the shelf is graciously paying me for the repairs as well, so all is okay. I planned to add to it anyway, and now I have a good reason to do so.

Among the additions, I plan to include a small, skeletal cat at my feet, to represent Bill, my childhood cat of 19 years who also deteriorated slowly over the past few years. Mute, blind in one eye, arthiritic and crippled from multiple strokes, and nearly deaf, he was eventually put down this past year.

This is probably the most persona lintrospective piece I have ever made, and definitely the one piece I have put so much time, effort, and love into. Nothing was half-assed. I barely slept for a week straight to make this exactly as I wanted it. I have never been so upset as when I saw it smash, but in a way, it's cruelly fitting for it to have broken. To make a piece about rebirth trough death; growth through destruction.. it makes sense for it to be destroyed for me to rebuild, all over again. And for it to be destroyed by the two men in my life that mean the most to be is... inexplicable, really. I'm not sure if it means anything, and if it does, I can only see negative warning in it.

Regardless.

I WANT

these shoes.

Eclipsed

So, for Illustrated Story last week, we had to read a short story and adapt into comic form, rather, sequential narrative.. since it's not very lighthearted subject matter. I've been scouring the internet for a copy of the story, but to no avail, so until I get around to scanning it, here's the comic:



14x17" Bristol board, ink & ink wash.

Graphics Class Stuff

I just wasted six hours of my life in Intro. to Computer Graphics. Boring. One of those classes I already know half the things I'm being taught, but have to wait on everyone else to catch up. Today we've been going through the basics of Photoshop, making still lifes out of stock photography. I made two, and all but landed an illustration job with the Memphis branch of the Navy via e-mail. Here they are (the still lifes, not the Navy):


[click to enlarge]


[click to enlarge]

Against Me: Reinventing Axl Rose

"...Just gimme a scene where the music is free / And the beer is not the life of the party / There's no need to shit talk or impress / 'Cause honesty and emotion are not looked down upon / And every promise that's made and bragged / is meant if not kept / We'd do it all because we have to, not because we know why / Beyond a gender, race, and class, we could find what really holds us back

Let's make everybody sing / That they are the beginning and ending of everything / That we all are stronger than everything they taught us that we should fear."

Defiance, Ohio : Drinking Song

"The first thing we do if we want to get through this dependency that we've been courting / Is to finally come clean with the lines read between and make flat feet of tiptoes we're walking / Say, "We're finished." Say, "We're sorry." Say, "We're scared there's this weight we can't carry." / Say, "I'm lonely, and frustrated, and I'm ready to be here to hear that."

And try as we might we'll try and we might... /crumble these walls with a flood of our words and we'll have a foundation to hold us... All these things i want to say, like "Honesty is so underrated." We're in this together, and that's okay. So why are we so afraid to say it?"

Who's going to Mexico with half her friends, an art history professor, and an anthropologist? This guy.

Art Dump

2 More in my Series of Personified Cigarette Brand Demons:
[click for larger images]





I bought two Moleskines yesterday. They're barely 3x5in at a whopping $10 per! But I figured I should get some while I had a few extra dollars before they are gone forever. And having a friend at the Art Center to help on discounts is a good incentive.

Ah yes, and I think I'm getting obsessed with Meso-American culture.

Observation

It is totally pointless to be a PetCo Pals member as a snake-owner. Mice never go on sale, and you can't choose what brand of mouse to buy.

Just finished this poster for tomorrow's class. So tired. No sleep in two nights. Must rest.



REVISION:


Now that I look at it... I like the text of the first more. I'll probably change that & reprint.

Pet Peeve #459

When photographers try to reproduce famous paintings with a "modern spin". Especially when it's done badly, and especially when the photographer relies on the merit of the original work to give the new shit quality, or context.

EXAMPLE:



INTO:



How can you even presume to capture all of the layers of that painting with a snapshot? How can you simplify Klimt's obsessive markmaking into a wallpaper pattern? How can you dumb his figures down to a mop-headed teenager in a smock? How can you not pay attention to the most simple picture plane aspects shared by painting & photography, so that there is no similarity in poise, mood, lighting, placement, delineation of space, shape, form, color, ANYTHING?

Art Dump

So Valentines Day has come & gone, and I got a manicure, pedicure, massage, steak dinner, bottle of table wine, and awesome Sci-Fi movie out of it all. What a darling boy I have, eh? All of my brilliant birthday gift ideas for Shea fell miserably through, so I ended up drawing him a caricature, like he had been whining at me to do. The angle of his head throws off the upwardly curled lip, so the smile I intended to balance out his wide eyes kindof disappeared... Or maybe I just think that, and it looks fine, and I should shut up so you think it looks good too...



Also, as of late, I have to say I'm still pretty excited by all the ideas I get these days for projects. The ideas I have are always stupid, or silly, or basically, not intended for a canvas or gallery, in the most blunt, stereotypical terms. It's as if finally taking a studio class that allows & even encourages silliness, stories, caricatures, and black ink has given me license to utilize them all again. Although I felt at the time that I was doing the right thing by challenging myself to draw naturalistically, I was bored to tears. It's really picturesque to think I came to art school to grow out of my comic book style of drawing, and have 4 semesters in, fallen right back into it, full-steam.

Anyway, I quite smoking this week, so I'm doing a cope piece. I'm attempting to personify individual cigarette brands into demons. I just finished the first last night, though I think I might be redoing him completely...



That's all, folks!